A Confusion of Princes

by Garth Nix

  ‘The Heffalurp?’ I asked. ‘Oh, that is the name of this ship. What system are we in, by the way?’

  ‘What system?’

  ‘I’m not an astrogator,’ I said patiently. ‘We did a lot of transits quickly, the last week or so. I don’t know which one we were up to when we got hit.’

  ‘This is Kharalcha,’ replied Raine. She spoke slowly and with effort. I looked at the vision-skin on the applicator. The symbiote wanted her to sleep now, to conserve energy.

  ‘It isn’t much,’ she continued, her eyes drooping shut. ‘But it’s home.’

  Not for much longer, I thought as I turned back to my work. Not if she was right about the pirates coming in.

  Home. That was a curious concept I’d learned a little bit about from the humans in the Adjuster training simulation. Something to do with a place, a family, and accepted status in a particular society. Not having a family, I supposed the Empire was my home, but not any particular part of it, nor with any particular people. Though it would be very helpful to have Haddad and my household back. Particularly if there was the possibility of pirates turning up.

  This line of thought led me back up to the bridge. There were shiplice working there too now, another positive sign. I caught two of them and, using my Psitek, prioritised them to work on the ship’s long-range scanners. The actual sensory nodes appeared to be undamaged, missed by the concussion wave since they were basically feelers that stuck out some six hundred metres from the hull. But all the nerve lines between the feelers and the bridge were dead and had to be restrung.

  I didn’t want to wait that long to get scan data, so I returned to the dock and jury-rigged a system that would repeat the scans from the capsule to Ekkie, with particular attention to the wormhole. If it looked like something was about to emerge, at least I would know about it.

  I also took the opportunity to eat from the capsule stores and have a drink that wasn’t recycled water from Ekkie’s internal reservoir. It was still recycled by the capsule, but it tasted better. I was still getting used to being tired and hungry. It had never affected me as much before. I thought I had been tired at the Academy, but in the training simulation and now, I had found out that the weariness of the ordinary human was a much harsher thing than the lassitude of a Prince who can tweak their mind and body chemistry at will.

  On the way back to the auxiliary ship-heart, I stopped by the wormhole-drive control room—and got a very nasty shock. I’d expected this craft to have a Mektek wormhole drive, because there was no Bitek equivalent and only the Sad-Eyes and the Empire had Psitek wormhole engines. That being the case, it should still be operational, the concussion wave only eliminating biological organisms.

  But there was no wormhole drive. The Heffalurp just had a great big hole where a drive used to be. Somewhere along the line, the drive had been ripped out and the space turned into a cargo hold. The Heffalurp was a purely interplanetary, not interstellar, craft. I had been wasting my time all along.

  Furious, I slammed my fist into the wall, forgetting that my hand was no longer as tough as a ship hull and I wasn’t in Imperial-grade armour. Ekkie protested that I had bruised its gauntlet, and inside, my fingers ached. The pain brought back the wise words of Commodore Elzweko.

  ‘Think about what a Prince would do about . . . then do the opposite.’

  Smashing the wall in fury was a Prince thing, and very stupid in my current circumstances. Reacting in anger would not help me. I had to assess the situation and plan ahead. Sure, the ship had no wormhole drive, so I couldn’t use it to start back toward the Empire—wherever that was.

  But maybe there were interstellar ships on the planet, or at its station. If I could salvage the Heffalurp and get it back to Kharalcha Four, maybe I could swap it for a smaller, faster, wormhole-capable ship.

  That sounded like a sensible plan. At least to someone like me, who had no experience in dealing with small planetary governments that were in fear for their very existence and would hang on to ships, any ships, like glue.

  Feeling slightly happier, I had just reached the auxiliary ship-heart, noted that Raine was still asleep, and was about to resume repair work when Ekkie brought a relayed message to my attention.

  The wormhole’s energy signature was increasing. Something was going to come out of it very soon. Within ninety minutes. Given what Raine told me had happened before, it seemed very likely that what would emerge would be the pirate fleet, and we would be a bonus prize ripe to be picked up en route to the sack of the planet.

  I must have cursed aloud, because Raine woke up.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, stress in her voice.

  ‘The entry wormhole is radiating,’ I said.

  ‘The pirates,’ said Raine.

  ‘Probably,’ I agreed. I looked at the vision-skin that was reporting the ship-heart status. It was improving, but there was no chance of reaching operational power within the next six to eight hours, and whatever was coming through the wormhole would be able to strike or even board us long before that.

  Raine followed my glance.

  ‘How is the ship-heart?’

  ‘Eighteen per cent,’ I replied. ‘Not enough to run the command systems, even if the thrusters are working.’

  It had been a worthwhile gamble, but it was not going to pay off. It was time to cut my losses. I looked at Raine, or more particularly at the rectangular box on her arm.

  ‘I’m going to have to take the symbiote applicator,’ I said calmly, going over to her and removing the box in one swift motion. ‘You can keep the symbiote, of course.’

  ‘You’re going to evacuate? In your capsule?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘What else can I do? Stay here and be killed or captured?’

  Those were now Raine’s options, of course, since I wasn’t offering to take her with me. But she had a different idea.

  ‘Help me fire the missile,’ she said.

  I stared down at those dark-blue eyes and wondered how the symbiote had let her brain chemistry get so out of whack.

  ‘The fusion torch?’ I asked. ‘It would never hit anything, at least anything that can manoeuvre. Waste of time.’

  ‘It can hit the wormhole exit,’ said Raine. ‘That’s what it’s for.’

  I tilted my head to one side, at least as far as Ekkie’s rather large helmet interior permitted, thinking about that. The wormhole exit wasn’t something that you could hit, at least physically. It was a kind of point of possibility between space and Null-Space that didn’t mean anything until particular energies were applied to make it connect to some other potentiality with similar characteristics.

  But I knew Raine wasn’t being literal. I’d obviously been mistaken about the missile’s warhead. It must be what was colloquially known as a ‘stopper’, and it didn’t need to hit the wormhole exit as such. It just needed to detonate its peculiar energy payload within a certain radius of a wormhole that was in the process of opening.

  If it did so, that wormhole would lose its potentiality, at least for a while. In other words, it would be shut off, and no one could get through for the weeks or sometimes months it would take for the effect to dissipate.

  It wasn’t a weapon the Empire used very often, if at all, and the strategy behind it was dubious. Closing a wormhole cut off potential help as well as enemies, and in any case, most systems usually had more than one entry wormhole. But I supposed in this case, with the system’s entire Navy wiped out and the near certainty of imminent enemy arrival through that particular wormhole, it made sense.

  ‘It’s a stopper,’ I said.

  ‘You got it. And I have the launch codes.’

  ‘It would have to be fired soon,’ I said, working it out. ‘No time to move it out of the ship. Its torch will finish off what the conc— the Imperial weapon did. And it will kill anyone left on board.’

  ‘How big’s your capsule?’

  ‘It’s a solo module.’

  ‘But you could squeeze two people i
n, right? For a short transit at least?’

  I supposed it was possible, and it slowly dawned on me that she expected me to take her along. She hadn’t even caught on that a minute or so before, I had planned to leave her behind. Once again I was reminded that I was thinking like a Prince and thinking of her as a programmed servant or something equally disposable.

  How would it look if I turned up on Kharalcha and they knew I had left one of their own behind? Particularly if she did manage to fire the missile and close the wormhole? I had been weighing up her potential use all wrong. It was not her immediate technical skills that were valuable; it was the potential debt her society might owe me if I returned her. After all, I would no longer have the salvaged Heffalurp to trade.

  And how much would the planetary government owe me if I closed the wormhole and gave them a breathing space to prepare against the pirates?

  ‘So how about it?’ asked Raine as she levered herself up. ‘We prep the missile to fire in thirty or so and bug out in your capsule?’

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  She surprised me by taking my hand and shaking it. I almost drew my needlegun with my left hand but managed to desist. I’d met a few hand shakers in training.

  ‘Welcome to the Kharalcha Space Forces,’ said Raine, and smiled.

  15

  I FROWNED. I’D NEVER said I would enlist in what must be a largely defunct militia.

  ‘It’s a joke,’ explained Raine. ‘Uh, meant to ease the tension of a stressful situation. You know, you laugh because otherwise you’d cry?’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I said. Princes made jokes—jokes were for equals. I was still having difficulty adjusting to my changed situation. ‘Can you walk?’

  There was only a narrow window of opportunity to launch the missile.

  ‘I think so,’ replied Raine. She clapped a hand on my shoulder and stood up, remaining slightly stooped. Then she slid a foot out and took a step, and then another. I found myself walking by her side, partially supporting her weight. It made for slow progress, and I knew that I should leave her to make her own way and speed ahead to the missile bay.

  But for some reason I didn’t.

  The missile bay control room must have been a hastily rigged lash-up of Mektek and Bitek modules even before the concussion wave took out its Bitek components. I set Raine down on the command chair, where she tried to get a status report on the vision-skin, while I went and caught as many shiplice as I could find.

  Raine watched as I dropped an armful of the creatures in the room and they scuttled into various access ports.

  ‘How did you program them?’ she asked curiously. ‘I thought all the louse-coding wands would be as dead as everything else.’

  ‘Uh, I’ve got my own,’ I said hastily, patting one of Ekkie’s pockets. ‘Just had to recalibrate. Is that control array working?’

  Raine forgot the shiplice and turned back to the Mektek control panel. It was lit up now, drawing power from the ship-heart.

  ‘It’s functioning on the tertiary backup level, without a holo,’ she said, drawing with her finger on the emergency input slate that had slid out when the holographic controls failed. ‘But the missile isn’t responding.’

  ‘The lice need to reweave the nerve lines,’ I said.

  Raine nodded. Her suited fingers danced on the input.

  ‘I’ve loaded the launch solution. It’ll begin to count down as soon as communication is established with the missile. Is there . . . is there any more activity at the wormhole?’

  I checked Ekkie’s internal vision-skin. There had been no further report from the module. I couldn’t interrogate further as the comms were all one-way. I hadn’t had time to rig up anything fancier.

  ‘Nothing yet,’ I said. ‘The last scan I got, it looked like a few hours till something comes through.’

  ‘I guess we just hope that the shiplice work fast,’ said Raine.

  ‘If you’ve set the launch, we could go now,’ I suggested. ‘Get a head start away from that fusion torch.’

  Raine didn’t answer immediately. Then she turned to look at me, fixing her eyes on my face. She blinked a couple of times. I found her gaze weirdly fascinating and wondered if the blinking was some kind of hypnotic domination effect, and cast my own eyes down. I was tempted to reach out with my Psitek, but if she had even a trace of psychic ability herself, she would feel it, and that might complicate matters far more than I would like.

  ‘No, I . . . I have to be sure the missile is okay,’ she said. ‘It’s my duty as the only surviving officer. I’ll . . . I’ll wait till the nerve lines are up and the missile reports green. But if you want to leave now, Khem . . . I understand.’

  I did want to leave. But the calculation I’d made before hadn’t changed. I needed to bring Raine with me to gain credit with the Kharalchans, and doubtless even more credit if we managed to stop the wormhole and thus the pirate attack.

  Also, there was something about her . . . I didn’t want to look bad in her eyes. I was starting to think of her as a fellow Prince. I could not do less than she did.

  ‘We stay then,’ I said.

  Raine turned back to her controls. I watched her for a second, then went out to gather more shiplice and check a couple of things. The quicker contact was reestablished with the missile, the happier I would be. If even one pirate got out of the wormhole before it was stoppered, we would be—to use an expression some of the humans were fond of back on the Feather in the training simulation—totally in the shit tank without an environmental recycling unit.

  But thirty minutes later, even with a dozen shiplice, we still hadn’t reestablished communication with the missile. There had been no further scan report from the capsule, but our window of opportunity was closing all too quickly. There couldn’t be more than an hour before the first pirate came through, and maybe less.

  ‘How long are you giving us to get clear?’ I asked Raine as I returned with yet more shiplice and hurried them into action.

  ‘The delay is set for twenty minutes,’ replied Raine. She was hunched over in the command seat, watching several vision-skins that were intermittently updating.

  ‘And at maximum acceleration, how long for the missile to get in proximity range of the wormhole?’

  ‘Twenty-one minutes, fifteen seconds.’

  Forty-one minutes in total. Too long. The pirates might get through.

  ‘Better make the delay twelve minutes,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not sure if I can move very fast . . . your capsule’s in L Dock, right? The smallest?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I just timed it, walking. Six minutes there. Two minutes to get in. One minute to launch. Three minutes at max acceleration . . . it should put us clear, given that the missile’s torch will have to burn through what’s left of the ship first. But we need to launch the missile at the wormhole as soon as possible—’

  A vision-skin flashed, and the input slate flickered. I felt a sudden tremor pass through the ship.

  ‘Connection established,’ said Raine calmly, as if reporting to the bridge. ‘Target acquired. Launch routine initiated. Twelve-minute countdown begun on . . . mark!’

  I grabbed her as she staggered out of the chair and lost her foot grip. I managed to stay upright and stuck on, and we half floated, half walked out the door. But in the corridor, Raine lost traction again and pushed me away as I tried to pull her up.

  ‘No! I’m too slow; you go!’

  I didn’t reply, but in trying to pull her up, I lost my foot grip too and ended up near the ceiling. I hung there for a moment, till I triggered the directional jets on Ekkie’s manoeuvre rig and came back down, getting my boot soles stuck back on the floor and giving me an idea at the same time.

  ‘Lie flat!’ I ordered. ‘Arms outstretched.’

  Raine obeyed, tearing her boots from the floor. She bobbed up slightly, enough for me to lean over and wrap both arms around her middle.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.


  I didn’t answer. I was sending a Psitek order, pushing every bit of my mental strength into it. Shiplice poured out of their accessways and spilled into the corridor, then turned to race away from us, their tiny minds imprinted with my desperate instruction.

  :Open all doors and hatches between this point and L Dock and keep them open:

  Then I pushed off, breaking my own grip, at the same time twitching to activate Ekkie’s main backpack thruster at a very low level. Bitek glands pulsed out reaction gas, and we shot along the corridor at a far faster speed than I’d anticipated, overtaking all but the leading shiplice.

  I dropped my foot to try to slow us down with some minor drag, but it worked too well. My foot stuck for a moment, sending us careening into the wall just before the next hatch. I caught the blow on my shoulder, Ekkie protesting about bruises again, and tried to correct with my directional jets. It kind of worked as we started off again, but with a corkscrewing motion that got worse as we went through the open hatch, a shiplouse waving its feelers from the control nerve as we flashed past.

  Raine shifted in my arms, dropping her arm and leg. I held her more tightly till I realised she was trying to compensate for the spin. We steadied and managed to take a sixty-degree turn and fly up a ramp with only minor collisions. The hatch ahead dilated, letting a veritable swarm of shiplice pour through seconds ahead of us. There were scores of them, far more than I knew were around.

  ‘Nine minutes to launch!’ shouted Raine. I hadn’t been checking the time with Ekkie and didn’t now. I was too busy negotiating the next ramp and then the door at the top of it, which barely dilated in time, parts of Ekkie scraping the door edges as we rocketed through.

  There was only the airlock ahead now. I saw a shiplouse jump at the control nerve, and the inner door stretched open. Then I realised they couldn’t open the outer door unless the inner door was shut, a basic safety measure even though the dock was pressurised.

  Hastily I killed the jet and dropped my feet, just enough to slow us down, or so I hoped. But again my soles stuck, jerking me to a much more sudden stop than I expected. Raine was torn from my arms and went barrelling along the corridor and into the airlock. I followed after her in a stumbling, sticking run. As soon as I was inside, the shiplouse shut the inner door and another one opened the outer door.